Self-Study CEU Opportunities

Book Clubs Self-study

Incorporating Literature Circles, or Book Clubs, in your classroom is an excellent way to make sure your students focus on key comprehension strategies and learn how to make deep connections as they read. See one teacher’s way of managing book clubs in her classroom, and come away with something you can try on your own!

Spelling Development SELF-STUDY

In this activity, you will learn, through observation of children’s writings, how knowledge about English orthography (correct spelling) is acquired. You will explore the regularity of the English spelling system, see how spelling supports reading, and learn how spelling both contributes to and results from, learning the language.

Strategies for Deepening Metacognitive Skills SELF-STUDY

Teachers must guide and scaffold by modeling critical thinking that enables deep reading comprehension. The article and webinar review the most important thinking strategies and include a model for "thinking aloud" to teach students how to utilize the strategies.

Write a script for a series of mini-lessons introducing and modeling at least five important strategies for reading comprehension as if you intend to use it to teach your students. Use a text of your choice to use for modeling the strategies. Use the webinar links as models of teaching strategies such as monitoring comprehension, interpreting figurative language, making connections and others.

Text Sets and Text Accessibility SELF-STUDY

At the end of this learning opportunity, you will have a new tool for expanding background knowledge before reading and extending comprehension after reading. You will see two examples of social studies text sets, learn what to include, how to evaluate the materials, and ways to differentiate instruction using text sets. You will read an article which will widen your view of science instruction with ways to use different genres of trade books, connecting literacy with scientific inquiry. Lastly, you will view a video which drives home the important idea of the contribution of background knowledge to understanding.

Describe the qualitative readability of each resource (review the first webinar).

Briefly describe the value of each resource to the topic you are teaching. This might be a statement of how you would introduce the resources to your students, and why you think they are important. You might use phrases like, “Notice the pictures (or graphs, sidebars, photographs) in this book. They might tell you a lot about…” or “From these websites, you might find out about…” or “Take a close look at the (object) and see what you can find out about…”